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If you’re following along with my blog, you know that I recently came to the conclusion that even Windows developers would be smart to pickup a Mac as their next developer machine. In that article, I made the argument that even if buying a Mac has a $500 premium, it would still be a non-issue and choosing a Mac would be the wiser choice. Taking my own advice, I just upgraded Axosoft Developer machines to Mac Pros, without doing any comparison shopping.

Today, I decided to see how much I would have saved for each developer if I had chosen similar Dell machines. Of course, I wouldn’t have cared what my savings would be, because part of the incentive to buy Mac Pros was to provide our dev team with the flexibility to develop anything for any platform. But to my huge surprise, buying a comparable Dell had a $1,304 premium!!! Take a look for yourself:

As you can see from the images above, the Dell price without tax is $4,153 while Apple’s price is $2,849.

Who is Dell joking here? Now to be fair, there are 2 differences in configurations:

The Dell System bus is 1,333 Mhz vs. Mac Pro’s 1,600 Mhz bus

The Dell Memory is 667 Mhz vs. Mac Pro’s 800 Mhz

That’s right! The Mac Pro has even a better configuration and costs $1,300 less. Upgrade pricing was equally insane. While Apple charged $200 for a 2nd 500GB drive, Dell’s price for that same upgrade was $339.

So now taking the Dell premium into consideration, the faster Mac Pro, better style and looks, the easier component access and ability to run OS X, is there any reason to stick with Dell?